Yunlong Chu

Yunlong Chu, Minglai Shao, Yuhang Liu et al.

Explicit Chain-of-Thought improves the reasoning performance of large language models but often incurs high inference cost due to verbose token-level traces. While recent approaches reduce this overhead via concise prompting or step pruning, they largely truncate what the model says rather than internalize what the model thinks. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by performing computation in the hidden space, yet prior methods face two critical challenges. Many existing approaches rely on rigid point-to-point alignment, forcing a latent token to approximate the final representation of a reasoning step, which can be insufficient to capture the dense, variable-length semantics of an entire reasoning segment. Furthermore, these methods often suffer from a lack of interpretability: latent states are commonly produced by unconstrained optimization or embedding mixing, yielding vectors that are difficult to decode or audit under the pretrained language head. We propose SPOT, a flexible framework that compresses explicit CoT into compact latent pause tokens without enforcing a fixed response template. At the core of SPOT is Span-level Semantic Alignment, a Sinkhorn optimal-transport objective that softly matches each pause token to the semantics of an entire reasoning segment, overcoming the rigidity of step-end alignment. To further improve interpretability, SPOT introduces a Frozen-Head Decoding Constraint that keeps latent states directly decodable as token distributions under the frozen pretrained LM head, enabling readable keyword interpretations of latent thoughts. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SPOT improves accuracy by 2.3 points on average while reducing generated tokens by 37.5% and provides faithful semantic interpretations of the latent reasoning process.

Hailong Chu, Hongbing Li, Yunlong Chu et al.

Multimedia event extraction (M2E2) aims to predict triggers, ground arguments across text and images, and then assemble them into schema-consistent event records. Recent LLM-based approaches have shown strong potential for M2E2, but their intermediate event hypotheses often remain implicit, and event-argument linking is still tightly coupled with role binding. This leaves little opportunity to inspect or revise intermediate event hypotheses and makes predictions brittle to early errors. To bridge this gap, we present ECHO, a multi-agent framework that reframes M2E2 as iterative refinement over an explicit Multimedia Event Hypergraph (MEHG). Instead of relying on implicit linear generation, ECHO performs auditable atomic updates over a shared hypergraph, making intermediate event structures explicit and revisable. Furthermore, we introduce a Link-then-Bind strategy that decouples event-argument linking from role binding, reducing premature semantic commitment during structured prediction. Extensive experiments on the M2E2 benchmark show that ECHO consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, achieving gains of 7.3 and 15.5 F1 points on event mention and argument role, respectively.

Yuhang Liu, Ruijie Wang, Yunlong Chu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning, yet increasing the structural complexity of inference does not consistently improve system-level returns. Methods such as Tree of Thoughts (ToT), Graph of Thoughts (GoT), and Adaptive Graph of Thoughts (AGoT) can boost accuracy on some benchmarks, but often introduce substantial overhead in token consumption and latency, and their gains can be unstable across task distributions-sometimes underperforming simpler Chain-of-Thought (CoT) or direct input-output prompting (IO). We attribute this inefficiency to stage-wise and node-wise heterogeneity inside GoT-style reasoning pipelines: high-quality planning and final synthesis are globally coupled and typically benefit from strong models, whereas many intermediate subtasks are localized and can be solved accurately by lighter models with far fewer tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose RouteGoT, a budget-controllable, node-adaptive routing framework for graph-structured reasoning. RouteGoT performs in-graph routing by prioritizing strong models for planning and synthesis, while dynamically allocating lightweight models and cost-effective strategies to leaf subtasks based on predicted difficulty. It further integrates explicit budget constraints into a global inference scheduler to control graph expansion under a user-specified token budget, enabling predictable performance-cost trade-offs. Experiments across reasoning, retrieval, and multi-hop QA benchmarks show that RouteGoT matching or improving accuracy while substantially reducing token usage; specifically, it achieves an average 8.1 percentage points accuracy improvement and 79.1\% output token reduction compared to AGoT. Furthermore, RouteGoT outperforms existing routing baselines by maintaining a superior cost-accuracy trade-off, demonstrating improved robustness under varying budget targets and tasks.

Bing Hao, Minglai Shao, Zengyi Wo et al.

The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated a growing interest in their capacity for processing dynamic graphs. Temporal motifs, as an elementary unit and important local property of dynamic graphs which can directly reflect anomalies and unique phenomena, are essential for understanding their evolutionary dynamics and structural features. However, leveraging LLMs for temporal motif analysis on dynamic graphs remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we systematically study LLM performance on temporal motif-related tasks. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, LLMTM (Large Language Models in Temporal Motifs), which includes six tailored tasks across nine temporal motif types. We then conduct extensive experiments to analyze the impacts of different prompting techniques and LLMs (including nine models: openPangu-7B, the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen series, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and o3) on model performance. Informed by our benchmark findings, we develop a tool-augmented LLM agent that leverages precisely engineered prompts to solve these tasks with high accuracy. Nevertheless, the high accuracy of the agent incurs a substantial cost. To address this trade-off, we propose a simple yet effective structure-aware dispatcher that considers both the dynamic graph's structural properties and the LLM's cognitive load to intelligently dispatch queries between the standard LLM prompting and the more powerful agent. Our experiments demonstrate that the structure-aware dispatcher effectively maintains high accuracy while reducing cost.

Yunlong Chu, Minglai Shao, Zengyi Wo et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face a fundamental adaptability challenge: their fixed message-passing architectures struggle with the immense diversity of real-world graphs, where optimal computational strategies vary by local structure and task. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a promising pathway to adaptability, existing graph MoE methods remain constrained by their reliance on supervised signals and instability when training heterogeneous experts. We introduce ADaMoRE (Adaptive Mixture of Residual Experts), a principled framework that enables robust, fully unsupervised training of heterogeneous MoE on graphs. ADaMoRE employs a backbone-residual expert architecture where foundational encoders provide stability while specialized residual experts capture diverse computational patterns. A structurally-aware gating network performs fine-grained node routing. The entire architecture is trained end-to-end using a unified unsupervised objective, which integrates a primary reconstruction task with an information-theoretic diversity regularizer to explicitly enforce functional specialization among the experts. Theoretical analysis confirms our design improves data efficiency and training stability. Extensive evaluation across 16 benchmarks validates ADaMoRE's state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised node classification and few-shot learning, alongside superior generalization, training efficiency, and faster convergence on diverse graphs and tasks.

Yuhang Liu, Minglai Shao, Zengyi Wo et al.

Pre-training Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is central to web-scale applications such as search, recommendation, and knowledge discovery. However, existing CLIP-style graph-text aligners face two key limitations: they assume strict one-to-one correspondences between nodes and texts, overlooking the inherent many-to-many relations in real-world graphs; and they rely on static alignment objectives that cannot adapt to varying data quality, making them brittle under noisy supervision. Together, these limitations expose a core dilemma: embracing expressive many-to-many alignment amplifies noise, while reverting to strict one-to-one strategies sacrifices semantic diversity and fails to handle inherently mismatched pairs. To address these challenges, we propose ADAligner, a dynamic, quality-aware graph-text alignment framework that dynamically adjusts between expressive many-to-many and conservative one-to-one objectives according to supervision quality. ADAligner estimates batch-level alignment reliability in real time and adapts its optimization accordingly, promoting soft, subgraph-level many-to-many alignment when supervision is clean, while emphasizing reliable one-to-one alignment by dynamically filtering low-confidence pairs under noise. Theoretically, we prove that this dynamic mechanism forms a stable negative feedback process, ensuring convergence and robustness. Comprehensive experiments on nine diverse TAG datasets demonstrate that ADAligner consistently outperforms prior graph-text aligners on zero-/few-shot node classification, link prediction and cross-modal retrieval tasks. It maintains strong robustness under noisy supervision and accelerates pre-training by approximately 2 to 3 times compared to multimodal baselines, establishing a scalable and reliable foundation for graph-text representation learning in real-world web environments.